The increasing incidence of antiviral-agent resistance by viruses that cause human disease indicates the need for a rapid method to determine the susceptibility of virus isolates to anti-viral agents. Current methods available are laborious, tedious, and non-standardized. Our approach is to grow the virus, initially herpes simplex virus, in replicate shell vials containing different dilutions of an antiviral agent, and then analyze the contents of the shell vials for growth inhibition by quantitative polymerase chain reaction.